EDDE 806 - Post VII - Now what was that about Open Ended Questions???

Last evening I joined 806 (which seemed to have a very small group of people attending) for their bi-weekly meetup. I think that for this post I will write more about my 2 take-aways from the session in general, rather than recap both presentations.:Take-away #1: Small sample sizes aren't necessarily a problem. Both Tracy and Leslie (presenters of the evening) were taking about their work

xMOOCs as on-demand documentary viewing

For the past semester I've mostly ignored synchronous learning on coursera. Instead of consuming materials as they are released, I log in once a week, download the videos for the course, and I keep them in my video library. If there are textual materials available as well, I donwload those, but I tend to focus more on video materials. When inspiration (or curiosity) strikes, I dive into

Lurk on, dude, lurk on!

The other day, while catching up on my (ever growing) pocket reading list, I came across a post from, friend and fellow MobiMOOC colleague, Inge on MOOCs. It was a rather on-the-nose post about MOOCs, learning, assessment, and the discourse used in MOOCs about learners. Concurrently I am working with a Rhizo team on a social network analysis post where the topic of 'completion' came up, and

Recently I read an article on Your Training Edge which aims to correct misconceptions surrounding MOOCs. The title of this particular post, and I guess myth that they tried to correct, was "MOOCs Aren’t Interactive, So There’s No Real Learning Taking Place". The basic idea in this misconception is really preposterous. I don't know when interactive became synonymous with learning, but it is

Can students opt out if you teach in Open Learning?

Siemens, 2014It seems like Connected Courses is the cMOOC that keeps on adding while we are in the process of conducting the course. I think, based on my own personal experience, that this (the addition of "features" as the course is in progress) is a hallmark of cMOOCs ;-).Anyway, Discussion forums have been added to Connected Courses, and a discussion cropped up on whether students can

One More Badge - discovered!

We are now in the middle of Week 7 (of 13) of the course I am teaching (INSDSG 619: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses) and one more of the secret badge is revealed!Discussion InitiatorCriteria: Must hit all elements of the discussion board grading rubric,Must be the first to respond in any given week, Must be a post that encourages other to respond and engage in discussion (i.e. have

Blogging, Lurkers, and Schrödinger's cat

Alright, so I guess we are entering the final frontier of #rhizo14 here, with week 11. Perhaps I should stop counting weeks and call this series of posts "This Week in Rhizo14" ;-) Last week I missed some discussions on P2PU, which I've gone back and answered some questions directed to me, but I think this ends my formal mingling in P2PU for Rhizo14 and I will focus more one the PLE aspect

Here come the lurkers!

Well, It's week 9 of Rhizo14 (or week 3 of the after party of rhizo14, depending on how you look at it.) Last week we had a discussion on de-mobing teachers (I guess enabling teachers to not teach to the test?). To be honest I lurked a bit last week on facebook since the day job, the other work obligations, the DML conference (which was awesome!) and subsequent weekend food poisoning

Attention splitting in MOOCs

The other day I caught a post by Lenandlar on the #Rhizo14 MOOC which is over, but we amazingly are keeping it going. At the end of his post on motivation that I wanted to address, since they've been on my mind and they've come up a few times in the past week.Are MOOC participants in favor of shorter or longer videos or it doesn’t matter? I can't speak for all MOOC participants, I can

The medium is the message...

The medium is the message...The medium is the curriculum... The community is the medium...The community is the curriculum!Well, we've made it to Week 5 of Rhizomatic Learning, and this week's topic shares it's title with the course itself! The Community is The Curriculum. Odd, to me this would have made a perfect final week (you know every end is a new beginning, circle of life learning

MOOC Participants who liked this post, also found this useful....

Jeeves will point you to the right discussion forumA couple of years ago when I was putting pen to paper and I was working on my Academic Check-ins paper I was doing some more research into recommender systems, you know the systems like the ones that they have on Amazon.com and Netflix whereby if you rate a certain product in a certain way, or if you view certain products, more recommendations come

First EdX (classics dept.) course done!

It's been a while, but I have completed the course. I don't know if EdX considers me a "completer" but I got what I needed from the course ;-) That said, the course I started back in the spring was The Ancient Greek Hero, offered through EdX (HarvardX in specific). I had been looking for an EdX course to take so I could evaluate the platform and the pedagogy, but most of the topics

OLDS MOOC Week 3 done!

Wow, this MOOC seems to be going by pretty quickly! We are already at the midpoint!This week I feel my participation in the MOOC was a bit more muted. I did want to participate more in the in the discussions but I got side-lined with start-of-the-semester things I needed for my day-job ;-) I did get through my stated activities (1, 2, 3, 4, 10) and I did do one of my optional ones (5);

MOOC Exploration continues, with the Canvas Network

One of my friends and colleague works for Canvas now, and we happened to be at the same NERCOMP workshop when news of the Canvas Network hit the wires. Honestly, I've been so MOOCed out recently with all the MOOC coverate and punditry that it's not easy to keep up with all MOOCs all the time. And, to be honest, if you want to really assess a MOOC strategy, my feeling is that you need to be a

xMOOC: of participation and offline apps

**sigh**The mobile client ate my post! I will try to reconstitute as much of it as I remember ;-)In this blog post I am continuing the train of though started by thinking about different levels of participation, and my blog post on MOOC registration. Since MOOCs are generally not taken for credit, and since they generally don't need to conform to some sort of departmental outcomes standard (i.e.

What is participation? How the LMS determines what you do

It seems like Rebecca and I were on the same wavelength yesterday when we were composing our blog posts and reflecting on various aspects of MOOCs. Rebecca wonders why there is only one level of participation in xMOOCs, and I have to say, having started my 3rd coursera MOOC yesterday (same one as Rebecca, the Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society on coursera), I can see that (from my limited

MobiMOOC 2012 | Final Week!

This is it! The final week of MobiMOOC is upon us! I have to say that this MOOC really passed by so quick that it was really hard to keep up with it :-) Last year's mobimooc seemed like it was much longer than 6 weeks (in a good way), and this year's mobimooc seemed shorter than the 3 weeks that it runs.Comparatively, I think last year I joined the mobimooc with the intention to be a moderately

Open can be lonely

Well, with my work on #ioe12 done, it's time for a little reflection! For whatever reason, as I may have stated before, I completely missed the announcement for #ioe12, which I guess ran from January to April (or May) 2012. I thought, that since the material is still available on the course site (OpenEducation.us) I would be able to go through and self-study.I did indeed go through and self-study,

MOOCs, and accreditation

It's quite interesting, but the topic of MOOCs and accreditation keeps coming up :-)The post that prompted this blog post came from a post I saw on MobiMOOC today regarding information assessment and recognition of success. In MobiMOOC 2012 one of the new things that is baked into the course is the awarding of badges, with an eye toward Mozilla's Open Badges. There are currently three types of

MobiMOOC 2012 - my participation roadmap

I just noticed on the Google group for mobimooc that my MRT colleagues (Micheal and Rebecca) have posted their guides on how they will be participating in MobiMOOC this year, so I thought that it might be a good idea to do the same since mobiMOOC just started, and it's good to set expectations ;-)I have to say that I generally don't come back for "seconds" once a MOOC is done. Once the course is done,

MOOCMOOC (μMOOC) Day 3

We are not half way through our first μMOOC!The topic of today is participation, deliberate participation, in education and learning. This is something near and dear to my own heart, and something I've commented on in at least one (if not more) MOOCs. Without participating, in my opinion, you can't really learn. Of course, there are degrees of participation, and even in online environments there is

Produsage and Participation in MOOCs

My colleagues and fellow MRT member, Osvaldo, posted an interesting blog post the other day. It is interesting in and of itself, but if taken along with the Chronicle's What's the Problem with MOOCs, if gives you a whole other dimension. Osvaldo makes reference to Bonnie Stewart's post (this was new to me, so thank you for the link :-) ) which is slightly reminiscent of the whole "digital

FSLT - to blog...or to comment...hmmmm

It's week 2 in FSLT, and the topic of this week is group participation. One of the things mentioned this week by the facilitators are the roles that people take in group work, which was quite interesting, as I could see people in my past group work experience taking on those roles consciously or subconsciously. In the MOOC forums there is quite a lively discussion this week (as there was last

Awoken from my change slumber for Week 34: where articles go to die?

I have come out of Change11 retirement (lurking status) this week (and probably the next few weeks). I was reading the Change11 daily yesterday when I noticed that George Veletsianos was facilitating the topic of Scholars' online participation and practices. I've been following George for a couple of years now, and I was really looking forward to this week, so I am back!I download the articles

Commentary on Commentary on Comments

The other day I was catching up on Change11 and I came across a blog post titled commentary on comments which caught my eye because it reminded me of an NPR news-segment :-) I was thinking about both the lack of comments on other blogs and the slow-down in blog posts in general on Change11.As far as comments on other blogs go, I can't really talk on behalf of other Change participants, but from my

On selfish blogging and form & function

Yesterday while taking the train back home from work I was catching up with Change11 related blogs. Two of them caught my eye and sparked my imagination (or perhaps cognitive process is a better word...in any case it got me thinking). First I read Tony Bates' initial summary of the week he facilitated, and then Jenny's response to him on selfish blogging.Tony writes (and this is not the